Even during the anthrax scares after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Dianne Brown and Sue Jendro declined to don surgical masks and gloves, so confident were they in the benevolence of their customers.

When a major water leak brought water down on the head of a letter carrier and closed their post office station, the two tucked it away in their mental scrapbooks and continued their duties in new digs.

The mail, as it often is said, must get through.

It just won't be going through them anymore.

After three decades working for the U.S. Postal Service -- more than half of it standing side-by-side in downtown St. Paul's historic Hamm Building and the now-demolished Wabasha Court building next door -- Brown and Jendro have decided to retire together, at the same place and time. Someone else will have to handle the Valentine's Day rush.

Their last day at St. Paul's Uptown Post Office Station in the Hamm Building on St. Peter Street will be Thursday, Jan. 31. The postal station will carry on without them until late March, when it will be folded into a new site at the U.S. Bank Center, 101 E. 5th St.

"The place will be here Friday, but there will be someone else staffing it. It just won't be us," said Brown, who started with the Postal Service 36 years ago and spent 25 of them at the downtown post office. "I'll be in my jammies."

After that, it's bon voyage.

In February, Brown plans to join her husband of four years to travel to the Minnesota Twins training camp in Fort Myers, Fla.

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, as well as Sanibel Island and the Florida Keys. Later they have a trip planned to Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean.

Jendro plans to paint her Minneapolis home, work on her garden and, above all, focus on her duties as musical co-coordinator at St. Francis Cabrini Catholic Parish in Minneapolis. "It's my favorite thing," she said.

Jendro, the relative newcomer of the pair, has worked for Postal Service for 29 years, 17 of them at the downtown office.

After starting at the central post office on Kellogg Boulevard and moving to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Jendro spent five years in the Wabasha Court Building, neighboring the Hamm Building's skyway level. Located at Sixth and Wabasha, across the street from Macy's, Wabasha Court was leveled to make way for a parking lot in 2002. The skyway went with it, except for a portion that still extends from Macy's to the empty space above Wabasha Street.

On New Year's Day, 2001, a major water leak inundated a postal carrier station, with a postal worker still in it. But even then, the mail still got through somehow. The Wabasha Court site, which had been in operation since the late 1980s, closed for good within the week.

As a result of the leak, the two women were shuffled to different locations, but eventually landed together again at their current site, the Postal Service retail counter on the ground level of the Hamm Building, behind the Meritage Restaurant and down the hall from Great Waters Brewing Co.

Brown and Jendro have come to know many of their regular customers by first name. They'll miss them all, but not enough to postpone retirement a single day.

"People are starting to drift in and get all teary, and it's making us teary," Brown said.